Transports: why in K'reel's name are they free?

[CrazyJ]

think about it, every single space faring vessel in the game requires some amount of alloys correct? they represent the high grade materials required for a space faring vessel.

so why does recruiting armies cost nothing but minerals,it makes no sense that a space faring vessel capable of holding thousands of troops(presumably), a legion of combat droids, or a warform capable of demolishing entire cities(think Godzilla scale) costs nothing. the only cost required is the mineral cost to provide them with equipment and the upkeep needed to pay them, nothing for the transport.

it makes no sense and needs to be changed, i think the best solution would be to add an additional alloy cost to armies, i am thinking a flat 100 as all transports appear to be the same design, aside from equipment, but equipment for unarmed ships is free for some reason. this would not only be much more realistic it would also give you a reason to use the largest armies available rather than spamming xenomorphs or clones.an alloy upkeep could also help mitigate spam but people might not go for that.

this would mean that non machine empires would need some equivalent to the mega warform other than the cybrex exclusive option.
perhaps a variant of it for each ascension path, for bio ascension some form of lab grown titan, for psychers some form of weaker summoned shroud entity that could be built for an energy cost(inferior to the one acquired via shroud roulette), and for synthetic empires simply allow them to build a variant of the machine empire mega warform that is functionally identical just with a slightly different flavor text.

this change would easily be possible within the game's current code and would require nothing more than changing a few numbers and adding a few new armies.
i know others have proposed better solutions than this but this solution could work and would require very little work on the dev's side to do so

what do you think, this idea could improve realism and allow for ground combat strategies other than spamming whatever your cheapest army is. admittedly it would mean that you would end up spamming your biggest army then but it would at least make armies less easily spammed in the early game, because as it stands defense armies are useless because of how easily armies are spammed

 

[CrazyJ]

my sincerest apologies for all the run-on sentences, English is the only language i speak and i am still terrible at it.

 

[Pancakelord]

Oh god, it's the CK3 boat situation ("Why did you remove CK2 transport ships?!"micro/realism thread) again lol

allow for ground combat strategies other than spamming whatever your cheapest army is.

Yeah... like exclusively glassing my targets from orbit then sending in a single army (if they cost alloys) because I'm not wasting any more alloys than absolutely necessary on taking a world.

• Transport ships (and, by extension, assault armies) weren't updated because ground assaults haven't been updated... ever, let alone post-2.0 alloy changes.
• A better question might be - why dont organic armies cost some amount of food? (e.g. 50 food / 50 min), clone armies could exclusively cost food (or food and 1 terraforming gas as an analogue for all the biomass and chemicals that go into making batle clones)... there are basically no food-sinks in the game, beyond pop-upkeep [food stockpiles don't even decay in Stellaris, usually leading to massive late-game food-price deflation].

The only changes armies have had since 1.0 is removing per-army modules (not a loss, was micro intensive as hell and did bugger all, stats-wise).
And removing the "Low Orbit"/Atmospheric level from the combat screen (below) - also no loss as it never actually got utilised in any way.

I assume at one point or another they'd planned to add fightercraft to shoot down incoming armies but gave up on that idea.
Someone on reddit even made an animated mockup of it at some point..

Looks better than what we have now tbh.

If that got implemented alongside an "army manager" screen, so I could build pre-designed groups of armies, jets, whatever (maybe I have an army template with lots of space-marine troops specialised in assaulting habitats, and another army template for hive worlds, with flame-mechs and napalm bombers, for example), then maybe I could see armies and transports costing alloys as something worthwhile, because that strategic/mechanical depth justifies the higher cost.

As it stands? Nah.

 

[CrazyJ]

Oh god, it's the CK3 boat situation ("Why did you remove CK2 transport ships?!"micro/realism thread) again lol


Yeah... like exclusively glassing my targets from orbit then sending in a single army (if they cost alloys) because I'm not wasting any more alloys than absolutely necessary on taking a world.

As it stands? Nah.

my point is that i am trying to eliminate the problem the game has where it is way to damn easy to spam a million early game armies and overwhelm defenses,i want defense armies to mean something again. making it so you have to choose between ships and troops will definitely do that.
the whole thing with realism is mostly a bonus

 

[pliznobn]

Magically turning into ships has occurred since the 11th century...

 

[Pancakelord]

my point is that i am trying to eliminate the problem the game has where it is way to damn easy to spam a million early game armies and overwhelm defenses,i want defense armies to mean something again.

This is the wrong way to go about doing that IMO. later in the game that still wont matter if youre snowballing, it just makes it cost a bit more to spam armies.

If you want to change up strategies you need to make hiring and losing assault armies more costly. For example:

• Triple the current warscore progress/cost incurred by losing an assault army (defence army deaths don't contribute war score currently, as defence is pointless enough as is without actively harming your military progress).
  • Combat dropping a billion Jarheads on to a machine-world, only to see them all killed in minutes by Rogue-Gundams ... won't help your war effort one bit.
• Add a stacking planetary growth/assembly modifier every time you recruit an army -
  • Organics (-5% growth "recruitment drive")
  • Robotics (-5% "production units diverted to military").
    • Stacks up to -40%, timer replenishes each time an army is raised... lasts for 5 years.
• Make losing assault armies increase pacifism attraction in your empire (really)
• And trigger protest events in war each time you lose a large number of (non-clone, non-robotic, non-xenomorph) armies, reducing stability on your worlds (could even key events to prefer to fire on any worlds in your empire that have military academies or bunkers, for extra flavour).
  • The game has a soft cap (believe it or not) on how many armies you can field. e.g. if you have 100 human pops, you can have at most 100 human armies at any one time. So "one army" is probably several million beings, relatively speaking.
  • The first time I encountered the sentinels event was on my jungle refinery world (which also had a few bunkers as it was near a wormhole) in the late 2260s. I lost a lot of people in that battle. It took me sending wave after wave of millions of humans for yearsto die against the sentinels to eventually get back that planet.
    • And after all that? Nothing happened. Had that happened IRL I would have irrevocably have crippled my population and probably reshaped the gene pool lol.

100 alloy costs will just make me bomb a planet from orbit, or i'll buy 10k alloys of the market in the mid/late game and spam out my doom-stack as normal, even if it stings a bit.

But Anti-war protests, domestic worker-strike events, mil/pacifist protester clashes & riots (literally causing combat scenarios on your worlds) reducing my stability?Anti-growth modifiers? That is gonna hurt me a lot more and will actively make me pursue a clone-trooper or military-robotics army if I want to carry on spamming troops, or at least make me think twice about dropping my troops in bottom-shelf battle armor on to a devouring swarm's hiveworld lol.

 

[CrazyJ]

This is the wrong way to go about doing that IMO. later in the game that still wont matter if youre snowballing, it just makes it cost a bit more to spam armies.

If you want to change up strategies you need to make hiring and losing assault armies more costly. For example:

• Triple the current warscore progress/cost incurred by losing an assault army (defence army deaths don't contribute war score currently, as defence is pointless enough as is without actively harming your military progress).
• Add a stacking planetary growth/assembly modifier every time you recruit an army -
  • Organics (-5% growth "recruitment drive")
  • Robotics (-5% "production units diverted to military").
    • Stacks up to -50%... lasts for 2 years.
• Make losing assault armies increase pacifism attraction in your empire (really)
• And trigger protest events in war each time you lose a large number of (non-clone, non-robotic, non-xenomorph) armies, reducing stability on your worlds (could even key events to prefer to fire on any worlds in your empire that have military academies or bunkers, for extra flavour).
  • The game has a soft cap (believe it or not) on how many armies you can field. e.g. if you have 100 human pops, you can have at most 100 human armies at any one time. So "one army" is probably several million beings, relatively speaking.
  • The first time I encountered the sentinels event was on my jungle refinery world (which also had a few bunkers as it was near a wormhole) in the late 2260s. I lost a lot of people in that battle. It took me sending wave after wave of millions of humans for yearsto die against the sentinels to eventually get back that planet.
    • And after all that? Nothing happened. Had that happened IRL I would have irrevocably have crippled my population and probably reshaped the gene pool lol.

100 alloy costs will just make me bomb a planet from orbit, or i'll buy 10k alloys of the market in the mid/late game and spam out my doom-stack as normal, even if it stings a bit.

But Anti-war protests, domestic worker-strike events, mil/pacifist protester clashes & riots (literally causing combat scenarios on your worlds) reducing my stability?Anti-growth modifiers? That is gonna hurt me a lot more and will actively make me pursue a clone-trooper or military-robotics army if I want to carry on spamming troops, or at least make me think twice about dropping my troops in bottom-shelf battle armor on to a devouring swarm's hiveworld lol.

i was going for an idea that could be implemented with relative ease, and would help with early game issues. attempting to curb snowballing is impossible without major changes to the game which always result in a mess(looking at you 2.2). my solution is simple and would help mitigate the early game spam problems. as far as i am aware my solution could even implemented by a modder who felt so inclined, it's that simple

 

[Pancakelord]

i was going for an idea that could be implemented with relative ease, and would help with early game issues. attempting to curb snowballing is impossible without major changes to the game which always result in a mess(looking at you 2.2). my solution is simple and would help mitigate the early game spam problems

It really doesnt though, how early is early game to you? Fighting primitives? you need 1, maybe 2 armies usually. Fighitng actual AIs happens (usually) at 2230+ by then my alloy income is already high enough that I could spam armies out, but it will sting,

It will just mean more time sitting around doing nothing as bombardment ticks up to soften the enemy defences up a bit, slowing down wars.

The only thing that slows down wars and invasions right now is having enough fleet power to overrun a tier 2 starbase + enemy fleet all at once (2.5-3.5k FP usually)
After that I wont incur losses (As there is nothing left to shoot back at me), so all remaining alloys can go in to "Army production", if needed, whilst my fleet repairs.

Hitting my economy (stab/growth) in a war is the only thing that will genuinely force me to change up my strategy, anything else will just lead to sitting around more, lord knows time is on your side with how tech-turtling & pop growth works in Stellaris.​

And for what it's worth, the first 3 points on my list can all be done quite easily, as they are just modifying or adding existing modifiers/national modifiers - 1-2 line changes pretty much.
Scripting protests, strike events and riots to reduce stability, do take a bit more work i'll admit.

 

[CrazyJ]

It really doesnt though, how early is early game to you? Fighting primitives? you need 1, maybe 2 armies usually. Fighitng actual AIs happens (usually) at 2230+ by then my alloy income is already high enough that I could spam armies out, but it will sting,

It will just mean more time sitting around doing nothing as bombardment ticks up to soften the enemy defences up a bit, slowing down wars.

The only thing that slows down wars and invasions right now is having enough fleet power to overrun a tier 2 starbase + enemy fleet all at once (2.5-3.5k FP usually)
After that I wont incur losses (As there is nothing left to shoot back at me), so all remaining alloys can go in to "Army production", if needed, whilst my fleet repairs.

Hitting my economy (stab/growth) in a war is the only thing that will genuinely force me to change up my strategy, anything else will just lead to sitting around more, lord knows time is on your side with how tech-turtling & pop growth works in Stellaris.​

And for what it's worth, the first 3 points on my list can all be done quite easily, as they are just modifying or adding existing modifiers/national modifiers - 1-2 line changes pretty much.
Scripting protests, strike events and riots to reduce stability, do take a bit more work i'll admit.

i was going for the simplest solution i could think of that wasn't completely stupid, but hey if your idea is as easy to do as you say than sure i will support it.anything is an improvement, i was just going for bare bones solutions. i still think that troops are too cheap though, troop costs were never adjusted following 2.2 when economies got way bigger. i was going to suggest sinply raising troop costs but minerals are so trivial to get that 10x the cost wouldn't faze most empires, so i decied to add alloys instead.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

The only changes armies have had since 1.0 is removing per-army modules (not a loss, was micro intensive as hell and did bugger all, stats-wise).
And removing the "Low Orbit"/Atmospheric level from the combat screen (below) - also no loss as it never actually got utilised in any way.

IIRC, autoregen in space wasn't a thing for a few patches, too.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

The whole army transport thing is dumb in lots of ways. They don't cost extra upkeep (beyond the army itself). They don't persist across landing and liftoff (which means you can instantly both repair damage and recharge jump drives just by touching down on a planet and lifting off again). They're incapable of fighting but vulnerable to combat-lock. They automatically deploy even when there's a hostile starbase in the system (at which point they get combat-locked and fly in circles tanking missiles with their face until they die or withdraw). They can't be customized (they have a bunch of inherent armor, for example, so you'd think they'd use their utility slots entirely for shields, but nooo) and are just as strong whether carrying slaves or Cybrex Warforms. They are shown in event chains as being able to board enemy ships and stations, but in normal situations that's never possible.

There's a lot this game could do to make ground combat better (why can't strike craft participate?), and a lot that it could do to make armies outside of ground combat better too (not even just transports... why doesn't occupying a planet during an ongoing war require troops?). I'm not holding my breath, though.

 

[stavern]

What are K’reel’s? Name of your species?

 

[CrazyJ]

What are K’reel’s? Name of your species?

if you don't know the meme than just go on the stellaris meme thread. he shows up pretty consistently past the first 50 pages or so

 

[methegrate]

This is the wrong way to go about doing that IMO. later in the game that still wont matter if youre snowballing, it just makes it cost a bit more to spam armies.

Agreed. Having the player build transports would just build in an extra step of micromanagement without any benefits to gameplay. You wouldn't make any different decisions because of this. It wouldn't foreclose existing options for you, nor would it open up new options for your opponent. It would just be an extra step taken the same way every time that gets you to the same result.

Even adding an alloy cost directly to armies to represent building the transport ships wouldn't change anything. It would still be the same snowball effect, just maybe a little slower because alloys come in more slowly than minerals.

Ground combat needs something to change the inevitable army spam that happens as soon as you conquer the star system around a planet. Otherwise, there's no mechanic that can outweigh the current logic of "and if I lose, I'll just make another 20 armies and try again." You might make those armies faster (with minerals) or slower (if you add an alloys cost) but it's still the asme result.

 

[Pancakelord]

Ground combat needs something to change the inevitable army spam that happens as soon as you conquer the star system around a planet. Otherwise, there's no mechanic that can outweigh the current logic of "and if I lose, I'll just make another 20 armies and try again."

Yep, this (alongside ground combat being braindead-simple) is the crux of the issue: armies act more like a stream of water, than actual soldiers from your empire, right now. There are zero strategic/economic/political consequences in sending trillions of troops off to die pointlessly, beyond the price to buy some more. Raising that upfront price does little.

In games constrained by real-world tech/birth rates, man power makes sense (EU4 / HoI 4 etc). But in Stellaris, an alien queen could poop out 500 shock troops a day, or a factory could print clone troopers/battle-bots by the thousands; setting arbitrary limits on unit numbers (what most games do) doesn't really work.​

That reddit rework would (probably) make ground combat interesting/deep enough that i'd actually engage with it, especially if it came with an army manager to make raising troops easier. But, IMO, the army spam is an issue that can only truly be solved with proper internal politics.

• Like, taking the number of assault armies that dies each month and somehow working that in to a "domestic strife" meter which then affects political factions and planet stability(i.e. resource output) and pop growth/assembly, to curtail spam.
• And, even then, that only reasonably works for normal "citizen troops"... Who cares if a billion soulless clones, or alien battle thralls or combat-bots die on some god-forsaken moon a thousand lightyears away, whilst you're safe at home in your pleasure palace...

For all the flack people give Stellaris over game design problems, reworking armies is probably the most difficult one to make both deep and fun without turning it into a tencent mobile-clicker (though that's basically what we have now...). Still, it is their job, as game designers, to find a way.

 

[methegrate]

Yep, this (alongside ground combat being braindead-simple) is the crux of the issue: armies act more like a stream of water, than actual soldiers from your empire, right now. There are zero strategic/economic/political consequences in sending trillions of troops off to die pointlessly, beyond the price to buy some more. Raising that upfront price does little.

In games constrained by real-world tech/birth rates, man power makes sense (EU4 / HoI 4 etc). But in Stellaris, an alien queen could poop out 500 shock troops a day, or a factory could print clone troopers/battle-bots by the thousands; setting arbitrary limits on unit numbers (what most games do) doesn't really work.​

That reddit rework would (probably) make ground combat interesting/deep enough that i'd actually engage with it, especially if it came with an army manager to make raising troops easier. But, IMO, the army spam is an issue that can only truly be solved with proper internal politics.

• Like, taking the number of assault armies that dies each month and somehow working that in to a "domestic strife" meter which then affects political factions and planet stability(i.e. resource output) and pop growth/assembly, to curtail spam.
• And, even then, that only reasonably works for normal "citizen troops"... Who cares if a billion soulless clones, or alien battle thralls or combat-bots die on some god-forsaken moon a thousand lightyears away, whilst you're safe at home in your pleasure palace...

For all the flack people give Stellaris over game design problems, reworking armies is probably the most difficult one to make both deep and fun without turning it into a tencent mobile-clicker (though that's basically what we have now...). Still, it is their job, as game designers, to find a way.

Agreed. And I think this is one of the many (many) areas where Stellaris has both an opportunity to make empires feel legitimately different and a huge problem in the fact that it doesn't. The differences you mention should create real, asymmetric differences between empires. (Not just another 5% difference here, 3% difference there.) There should be a real difference between the capacity of empires that prioritize individual lives vs. ones that have warehouse full of cloning vats vs. brood queens that lay a million eggs in a bunch etc.

And some of these empire should simply be better at war than others, or should have asymmetric options depending on their tech and ethics. For example, a hive empire might create ballistic landing pods that can invade even without taking over the system because, unlike an empire of individuals, it doesn't care that half will get shot down in transit.

I completely agree that this should have a major political component to it. But I also would actually like to see additional hard limits based on an empire's inherent nature. As with fleet combat, a logistics system would be great. Or manpower for appropriate empires. Or equipment/weapons. Something like that.

 

[Pancakelord]

But I also would actually like to see additional hard limits based on an empire's inherent nature. A logistics system (as with fleet combat) would be great.

Actually... when I think about it your point about logistics might be the answer to capping armies and it can even work for all 3 main empire types. Basically supply and manpower all rolled in to a single ambiguous admin stat (which is par for the course for stellaris lol) - Deployment Capacity "DC":

• Standard+Megacorp empires: Deployment Capacity (DC).
• Gestalt MI 'lore' justification: 'Logistics Processing Bandwidth'
• Gestalt Hive 'lore' justification: 'Somatic Load'

Each empire still can, in theory, build as much as it likes of whatever assault unit it has unlocked to it, but it is their administrative functions that hold them back from building and deploying unending tidal-wave of forces. Each built army carries a DC value - basic assault armies would have DC=1, but more powerful armies take up more cap (psi commandos, mega-warforms and xenomorph armies could have a DC of 5 or even 10, for example) to reflect their higher potency.

Spoiler: (Scaling) Effects of exceeding the Deployment Cap

If an empire exceeds it's mil cap (X Assault armies/Y DC) it represents the Military Staff (or Gestalt mind) being overwhelmed/incapable of supplying and commanding all those troops, simultaneously. Leading to lost/missing supplies and reduced combat effectiveness, getting worse the longer you're over the DC.

1. Your armies suffer combat disadvantages (-morale "low on rations"[Grease for robots?, idk] -damage "Our munitions and fuel haven't arrived")
   • Combat disadvantages could apply to defence armies too, even if they don't contribute to the DC cap, themselves.
2. And if you continue to exceed your mil-cap, armies and generals may desert you (Who is going to fight for someone that won't even keep them fed/maintained?) until you fall back under your Deployment cap.
   • Gestalt drones & leaders may go renegade/deviant, thinking the hive mind no longer cares for them.
3. You might piss off militarist factions ("You mis-manage our forces!") and even other factions if it gets bad enough ("Our army is weak, We don't feel safe!").
4. Maybe a GC regulation breach could be thrown in for people who exceed their cap. making things even worse.

Spoiler: Applying the cap to Tall V Wide

You'd increase your SC cap via Soc techs, with it scaling off some fraction of your overall population or even your Admin cap. Something like [DC=5+(Admin Cap/10)*tech_mults]
This would lead to a two-way dynamic:

• A tall, technologically advanced empire can't get away with spamming slave armies, with it's smaller cap ... but it could convert most of it's forces to highly geared psi commandos to make the most of what it's got, for example.
• A sprawling knockoff Imperium of Man could still get away with throwing cheap slave armies (with their low upkeep) at their enemies, with the odd tougher unit ("Gene Warriors" lol) thrown in for fortress worlds, as it has a large cap to support that army composition.

It wouldn't be a hard limit, and it doesn't resolve you just building more troops as soon as some have died (that would come from pissed off political parties/ national modifiers increasing recruitment cost/time, as mentioned earlier).
But, if the debuffs and army desertion events (both could increase in severity over time, until you're back under the cap) are strong enough, you sure as heck wouldn't want to exceed the Deployment cap for anything other than short periods.

 

[Katsue]

• Make losing assault armies increase pacifism attraction in your empire (really)

War exhaustion in general should increase Pacifism attraction, and arguably also Egalitarian attraction. It should also be a real system as it is in Europa Universalis. At the moment, the only real brake on an Empire's expansion at a certain point is the player's own war exhaustion.

 

[aroddo]

War exhaustion in general should increase Pacifism attraction, and arguably also Egalitarian attraction. It should also be a real system as it is in Europa Universalis. At the moment, the only real brake on an Empire's expansion at a certain point is the player's own war exhaustion.

And then we make some buildings produce propaganda to offset the effects of pacifism.
Not sure if that adds much to the experience.

 

[CrazyJ]

i wasn't proposing forcing players to create seperate transport, i was simply suggesting tacking on an alloy cost to armies to account for the transport. it would add little micro but it would at least mean that losing armies was a bit of a loss